Five Daunting Sales and Marketing Gaps

[Pages:28]Five Daunting Sales and Marketing Gaps

And how to overcome them

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How you'll benefit from reading this guide

What sales and marketing gaps are you defending? How are they impacting your ability to hit your numbers? In this guide, we examine five massive gaps that could be costing you time, customers, top-line growth, and profit. And we show you how to transform your business by closing those gaps so you can get back to growing.

? Discover how to transform your business by connecting sales and marketing with a shared set of practices that have been proven to grow brands, grow revenue, and increase profit.

? Get expert advice from leaders who have walked in your shoes, leaped over the gaps, and unleashed sales and marketing to drive growth--together.

? Watch insight-packed webinars from Forrester Research, Microsoft, and Adobe.

24%

B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieve 24% faster three year revenue growth and 27% faster three year profit growth.?

58%

Over half of the companies surveyed rate their alignment of sales and marketing as poor. ?

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THE OBSESSION GAP Obsess about me, not you

Connect sales and marketing around a shared vision that transcends their individual goals. Companies that follow the approach we introduce in this chapter were 2x more likely to report 10% or greater annual revenue growth.

THE GOALS GAP They say leads, you say revenue

It's no secret that sales and marketing have had their fights over the years. This chapter is all about bringing them together around a shared goal that helps sales hit quota and has 75.6% of marketers looking forward to a year-over-year budget increase.

THE CONNECTION GAP It's my journey, I'll buy if I want to

Tackle the infinite complexity of the buying process by aligning your sales and marketing teams, processes, and technology to serve the buyer and effectively connect with the buying committee.

THE TRANSFORMATION GAP Can you see the gap in your process?

Companies that eliminate this gap generate an average of $100 million more in additional operating income each year. Get practical guidance on how you can close this gap and hit your numbers with fewer headaches.

THE HAPPINESS GAP It's personal, not business

Discover why 94% of consumers will leave a brand, and find out what to do about it. Then get insights about how you can anticipate customer desires and create the kind of personalized brand moments they crave.

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THE OBSESSION GAP

Obsess about me, not you

As a consumer, you've likely endured countless bad experiences driven by business-centric marketing and sales practices. Well-meaning sales reps and marketers are working hard to hit their numbers and you're a necessary casualty along the way. They fill up your inbox with irrelevant emails, chase you around the Internet with poorly targeted banner ads, and call you countless times to sell you something you've already purchased. These are all signs that a company is business-obsessed, rather than customer-obsessed. And they're also signs that you're probably going to take your money elsewhere.

23%

According to Forrester Research, " Only 23% of B2B marketers claim to have a customercentric ? versus a channel-or product-centric ? organizational structure."?

2x

Customer-obsessed B2B firms are 2X more likely to report revenue growth of 10% or more in the last fiscal year.

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Aligning marketing and sales around the customer experience is paramount to shortening the sales cycle and increasing win rates. Without a tight connection between marketing and sales activities at the prospect and customer level, the debate on quality of leads versus sales effectiveness will continue to create distraction and confusion. CMOs who get this are taking increasing ownership of growing leads, opportunities, and revenue targets with a relentless focus on customer experience."

Thom Gruhler CEO, Fjuri

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Grow by focusing relentlessly on the customer

Business-obsession is indefensible because top-line growth begins and ends with the customer. We can talk all we want about funnels and pipelines, campaigns and KPIs, technology and process, but at the end of the day the customer has the money, they expect you to be obsessed with their needs, and the decision is theirs.

The challenge for many businesses is that, while they give lip service to the customer, their disconnected organizational structures, funnels, campaigns, content, technology systems, and goals are business-centric. This creates experiences that may serve the business in the short term, but fail to delight the customer in a way that drives long-term growth. What's needed then is an all-up focus on customer experience that will drive the long-term revenue growth your company needs to stay in the game.

Transforming customer experience, or CX, requires a deep commitment across the entire enterprise to align every touchpoint to the customer. A key part of an all-up CX transformation is the buyer journey map, a customercentric framework that will enable you to deeply engage customers by aligning your people, processes, and technology to your key buyer personas so that you can serve and nurture your current and future customers with the right content throughout their journeys.

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Critical questions for reflection:

? As a marketing or sales leader, what kind of experiences are you creating for your buyers?

? How well do you understand these future customers?

? Are you helping them meet their goals on their buyer journeys, or are you trying to force them down the funnel?

? Do your sales and marketing teams work together to serve buyers, or do they work against each other?

? Do your processes and technology support the buyer journey or disrupt it?

ACTION STEP

Watch the Microsoft Dynamics 365 webinar

Modern Selling Revolves Around the Customer and get actionable insights from Forrester Research analyst John Bruno on how to align the seller process to the buyer journey.

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THE CONNECTION GAP

It's my journey, I'll buy if I want to

Failing to connect with the buyer is indefensible for obvious reasons. The buyer is in control and they will decide their ideal path based on millions of potential contributing factors that you likely have little influence over.

What is the optimal engagement path or journey for your buyers and how can you connect with them as individuals? The simple answer is that there isn't one. Each buyer's journey is unique, and that introduces extraordinary complexity for the marketer who is trying to connect with them and their data across online and offline touchpoints--all while trying to nurture the buyer and accounting for their ever-shifting emotions, company politics, budget constraints, and interactions with the buying committee.

16

Decision makers The buying committee for a technology purchase is made up of an average of 16 decision makers.

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